Goodbye TV, Hello Broadband

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Goodbye TV, Hello Broadband

It was the ultimate challenge for any lifelong TV watcher. Wired News asked me to cut the coax cable snaking into my HD-ready television, and for 30 days rely solely on legally available internet content to satisfy the video entertainment needs of my family of five.

We posed the question: Is the internet finally ready to kill old-school television?

The rules were simple: Anything I could download was fair game, but there'd be no TV signal via cable, satellite or the airwaves. We decided that watching television that had been cached on the family's TiVo box was also cheating, so that went into the closet. At my editor's insistence, I physically severed the cable between the wall and my television with wire clippers. And on a blustery November day, my cable company came and took my set-top box away.

The first step was obvious – get an iTunes subscription and start downloading our regular shows.

It was a homecoming of sorts. I gave up my last Mac – and its horribly buggy (at the time) operating system – in 1997, and hadn't touched an Apple product since. My dislike of Apple's copy protection scheme for music has steered me clear of iTunes and the iPod. My unwillingness to invest in a whole new software platform kept me away from the latest Macs and OS X.

So iTunes may be old hat to many, but the experience was new to me. While iTunes has 3.5 million songs, 65,000 podcasts, 20,000 audio books and over 5,000 music videos, according to Apple, I was mainly interested in the 250 TV shows, which Apple added in October 2005 and the small but growing selection of movies, which the company added in September.

Reviewing the iTunes catalog, I began to think this challenge wouldn't be so hard. The good children's shows that any parent would recognize – Dora the Explorer, The Backyardigans and Blue's Clues – had at least one season available. The broadcast and cable network programs my wife and I watch – Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Jericho and The Daily Show – were also offered. Thanks to Steve Jobs, we wouldn't miss a single cylon being fragged.

I downloaded a few programs, signed up for a 16-episode pack of Jon Stewart, and on Nov. 3, the experiment began.

What happened after that was a bit surprising.

Weird. That's the only way to describe the feeling of the first few days. While the social benefits of TV watching are debatable, the experience does bring the family into the same room – at least physically.

Suddenly, our family was not sitting together in the living room watching television – except for the occasional DVD movie – but instead scattered around the house. My wife and I watched our shows on our office computers, and our kids watched theirs on a laptop in the kitchen. Within a few days, the diaspora driven by digital content already made the house seem, well, less homey.

This was all the more surprising because television has never been the center of our family life. Before the experiment began, my wife and I were already watching far less TV than the average household, which analyst firm Nielsen Media Research pegged at over 8 hours per day during the 2005-2006 television season. We'd already begun talking about canceling our cable TV subscription, when Wired News asked me to play guinea pig.

But it became clear that watching content on the same devices on which we did our jobs and home finances robbed us of some intangible benefit. By wanting to watch videos in a central location, I was not in the minority, either, said Joseph Laszlo, research director for Jupiter Research. "The big issue that prevents more people from going completely to the internet is being able to watch their shows on the preferred device – the TV."

So I bit the bullet and bought a Mac mini, which at approximately $700 seemed to be a far better deal than a PC running Windows XP Media Edition. With Front Row, I figured the little white box would offer TiVo-like functionality through the minimalist remote.

The mini actually took a little while to get hooked up. While my television – a rear projection HD-ready "monitor" – has an SVGA connector on the back, apparently the manufacturer did not mean computer monitor when it labeled the set with that moniker. A regular monitor cable didn't work, no matter how much I played around with the Mac mini's display settings. Over the next two days, I went into hardware testing mode: Hook the Mini up to a real monitor, try a different setting, plug it back into the TV, doesn't work, rinse and repeat.

Apple's S-Video converter cable became my salvation, although a canvassing of the local electronics stores did not turn one up, so we had to wait a week to get the dongle from Apple.

In the end, however, the Mac mini perched next to my Xbox 360, and the pair became the only boxes to clutter the top of my big-screen TV. I delegated DVD movies and, of course, games to the Xbox and downloaded videos to the Mini.

Pretty soon, a drawback to pay-as-you-download television became apparent: À la carte content costs money. TV shows at $2 a pop, and movies at $10-plus, add up. While I'd hoped to save on monthly fees, I found that our iTunes spending quickly surpassed my old monthly cable bill.

So I looked beyond iTunes, where, fortunately, it turned out that finding free, legal television programming was not that difficult. Plenty of viewable shows can be found on the networks' sites. CBS offers full episodes for free on its InnerTube web video player, and NBC offers the latest episode of many of its shows as well. The shows generally appear the day after they air – about the same lag time as iTunes – and most allow the video to be expanded to full screen.

The quality is quite good. Streaming video on the internet has come a long way since last decade's postage-stamp-on-the-monitor video quality. At full screen, the video stream for Jericho and The Class looked comparable to digital video from my former cable provider. Occasional hiccups marred the experience, however: The video sometimes turned jumpy, and many times the video stream wouldn't start. And, of course, you can't save the episodes to disk.

Yet, rather than feel threatened by the internet, the television networks are excited about the traffic. The video streams have single-ad slots about every 10 minutes, far fewer than TV, but still lucrative for the network.

"It is already paying for itself," Dana McClintock, spokesman for CBS, told me during an interview in early December. "The cost is very small. And the advertisers are very excited about this."

The networks are not finding that the internet cannibalizes their audience on TV, at least not yet. Jericho, CBS' post-apocalyptic serial drama, has become a popular clip on YouTube, is available on iTunes, and can be seen free on the web. The multiple means of watching the show has contributed to its success, not undermined its TV ratings, said McClintock.

"The good news is that we are finding this online viewing to be additive," he said. "Ratings are not going down, and the viewers are getting synergy: People who watch online go on the air, and people who watch on the air go to the internet."

With movies and decent television programming at my fingertips, I thought McClintock's enthusiasm wasn't misplaced. Then I tried watching live sports.

It turns out, watching a New England Patriots' game online is impossible. The only streaming option at this point is NFL Game Pass, a joint effort between the NFL and Yahoo priced at $250 for the 17-game season and only available overseas.

Getting game summaries is much more reasonable. ITunes has a mediocre mashup of game-day video available each week at its standard $2 price, but the web offers the best option: The Patriots' site offers free video, including recaps of the games, albeit at lower video quality than iTunes.

The issues with sports underscore the problems with internet delivery of real-time video, such as games and breaking news. People don't mind waiting for the long download times of evergreen content such as movies, which generally weigh between 1 and 1.5 GB, but they want higher definition. And getting weekly serial dramas the day after they air is painful only for the most impatient fans. But sports and breaking news lose their shelf life very quickly, and that means the only proper means of delivery is live streaming.

In March, CBS offered all the non-televised college basketball games as video streams from its website, and outside of some hiccups on the first few days, had no problems streaming to hundreds of thousands of viewers, said CBS' McClintock.

But pushing content to a larger number just wouldn't work, said Jupiter's Laszlo. The internet isn't architected for it. "Streaming and downloading work well right now, in part because they are not super-popular," he said. "However, the entire internet might be threatened, if everyone in the U.S. woke up one day and started consuming video over the internet."

On Nov. 22, near the end of my month searching the internet for signs of content, Microsoft introduced its own video service, Xbox Live Marketplace. I quickly dove in.

The service sports an interface geared more for a gamer than someone interested in quickly finding the latest movies or TV shows to download. And days after the launch, previews would not reliably start. The catalog also has weaknesses: Some long-running shows have more past episodes available than on iTunes, but current serial dramas lag behind Apple's service.

On the plus side, the service offers high-definition content and a new choice for online consumption: rentals.

Microsoft's rental system is essentially the same as cable companies' video-on-demand options. You pay, download a movie, get two weeks to play it and, once you begin, you have to finish in 24 hours. Not the strongest model, in my mind. For my wife and I, finishing a movie in a day can be a struggle, so we had to wait for a night when all the kids had fallen asleep to take the plunge, gambling we could eke two hours of movie-time out of the next 24.

Microsoft said the hassles are a function of the realities of the content industry.

"The time limit is very much driven by the contract," said Aaron Greenberg, group product marketing manager for Xbox Live. "Companies like HBO have extracted a lot of concessions from content companies in terms of what they can do – and limiting what other companies can do. Those deals are long-term contracts, and they are not going to expire for a number of years."

I'd rather see a Netflix-like model where a number of "slots" on my hard drive could be filled with episodes of whichever shows I wanted to watch. Yet, stringent contracts mean that new models of distribution will likely not arrive for some time.

I asked Greenberg about the Xbox service's limited offerings. He pointed out that Microsoft has six partners in place for movies; that's more than iTunes, which offers films created by Disney and its Pixar, Miramax and Touchstone studios. Greenberg also promised it only gets better from here: More deals, more content and more delivery models are in the works.

"In this space, we are in the early, early days of the internet," Greenberg said. "We are doing things in digitally distributing content that has never been done before."

Families like ours could also help digital download services, such as iTunes and Xbox Live, have a better chance of survival. In early December, analyst firm Forrester Research studied the buying habits of online households and found that only 3 percent made an iTunes purchase, and each household averaged $35 dollars over a year. On average, each iPod owner is only buying 20 music tracks at $1 each. However, if more consumers start buying television programming, the recurring revenue from major series could boost Apple's bottom line.

As for my family, we've decided to remain cut off from cable television, and live with the net as our entertainment lifeline. Before the Wired assignment came along, we were already headed toward paring our television consumption down to a few shows a week and the experiment showed that the internet could do that much.

I expect that our spending on old-style DVDs will slow as we get a more diverse library of movies and TV shows on iTunes, and move to rent movies on the XBox Live Marketplace that we otherwise don't want to own. While the copy protection on the videos makes me somewhat paranoid about a hard drive crash, reducing the clutter of DVDs on our shelves is an unlooked-for benefit.

In the end, getting videos from the internet is not the same as live television programming. However, in a few years, I believe it will be better.